In a Hollywood Reporter piece about the former pride of the peacock, Michael Wolff states the obvious–network news organizations are of little or no consequence apart from in some odd phantom sense–but he makes the case really well. An excerpt:

Maintaining the evening news was perhaps more useful for the corporate agenda than it was as a programming tool or journalistic function. Indeed, despite its 8 million or so nightly viewers and an estimated $200 million in annual ad revenue, Nightly News long has run against the currents of news programming and become quite an organizational sore thumb — a phantom power base that commanded a strange primacy in the corporate bureaucracy. Williams, mostly irrelevant to the overall NBCUniversal bottom line or to the news itself, was yet very powerful.

Each of the networks has, over the past decade or more, made tentative efforts toward disbanding the evening news or combining it with cable operations, or, in many variations of this deal discussion, partnering with CNN. In effect, everybody recognized that the nature of newsgathering had profoundly changed and that networks could not compete (or had no interest in competing) as all-purpose news organizations. But in the end, nobody wanted to take the PR hit for killing the news, or lose the PR advantage in having it.

Until Williams, once the ultimate PR asset, became the ultimate PR nightmare.•